Larry Hosken: New: 2009

Book Report: Crossing the Chasm This book is about marketing; about marketing for products which are at a certain stage: they have enthusiastic "early adopters", but no big uptake. This stage sounds familiar to me based on my expe...
Book Report: Crypto This last weekend, I pitched in for a playtest of MSPH12 "Jeopardy!". These puzzle-solving endeavors have wonderful moments. Solving puzzles in a team environment--it's very satisfying when my skil...
Book Report: Engineering the City This book, Engineering the City showed up as an Amazon.com-recommended book, probably because I liked Brian Hayes' book Infrastructure so much. I kinda wish I'd paid more attention to the details of...
Book Report: The Forms of Water It's a novel by Andrea Barrett, but it's not about scientists or even lab assistants. Who knew that Barrett wrote about anyone other than scientists and lab assistants? This novel is about people. ...
Book Report: Peopleware I work for a large company. Thus, there are "leadership seminars" with "team-building exercises." I attended one of those. I was confessing this to some friends on Saturday, and one of them knew e...
Book Report: The Psychology of Computer Programming How to get programmers to get along together. Attempts to use psychology to design easier-to-use computer language features. Discussion of which is better for your organization's culture: batch proc...
Book Report: Refactoring HTML This book is about cleaning up HTML, the markup language used to write web pages. It's a good book. I'm going to kvetch a lot about parts, but... kvetching comes easy. Anyhow. You know how liberal...
Book Report: Snoop Yesterday, my office-mate told a story about the struggle with stuff. Her house had a lot of clutter. She was sick of it. So she cleared stuff up. She got stuff organized. She gave stuff away. ...
Link: Coffee to the People I guess as long as I'm linking to a cafe, I should link to the place where I pick up coffee on weekend mornings: Coffee to the People. I claim that it is awesome. It's a cafe at Haight on Masonic. T...
Link: Free Andi Watson Comic You don't have to blog about the things you're thinking about. Sometimes the things you're thinking about... don't bear blogging. Sometimes you can use blogging as an excuse to think about somethin...
Link: Help Get Sita out of Copyright Jail The fun of watching cartoons plus the smugness of giving to a good cause: I encourage you to Help Get Sita out of Copyright Jail You might remember the cartoonist Nina Paley. Or you might not rememb...
Link: Musicbrainz I haven't posted a new J-ska review in ages. Did they do any good? I don't know. I got angry emails from folks who wanted to make sure that I should really give the band Mongol 800 another chance;...
Link: Two Narrow Establishments in the Inner Sunset My neighborhood has a hot dog shack: Underdog. It's at around 18th Ave and Irving. I like it, and suspect that my foodie friends might like it, too. They might not trust my judgement, of course. ...
Link: Warren Spector, Playing Word Games Warren Spector does not, as far as I know, play uppercase "T" The uppercase "G" Game. But he designs lowercase "g" games. He worked on some good stuff for the Paranoia pencil-and-paper RPG... uhm, ...
Milestone: 13 Million Hits Wow, it's the site's 13000000th hit. (Sort of. Actually, it probably passed 13000000 a while back. I skipped counting a bunch of hits (most of them?) during October-November. Anyhow.) 124.185.38.69...
Site: Updated Contact Info New Phone Number I have a new phone and a new phone number to go with it: 1 415 868 4629. So I updated the Larry Hosken Contact Info page and there was much rejoicing. I also have a Hello Kitty bag to hold the phone...
Book Report: American Shaolin Yestere'en, I watched the Chinese New Year's parade. I'm not into parades, but I visit a fair number of parades. Why show up an event I'm not into? A non-trivial fraction of my friends are photograp...
Book Report: Exploiting Online Games This book is about hacking online games. Unfortunately, they started out talking about plenty of stuff which I already had read about. Cheating happens. E.g., people in shoot-em-up games use video...
Book Report: Growing a Business This is a book about running small businesses. The title says "growing", but it might as well have said "evolving". Hawken is thoughtful and wise, reminding the reader not to take on too many probl...
Book Report: The Non-Designer's Design Book An introduction to layout design. There are general principles; there was also more detailed advice on designing brochures, business cards, and other stuff I don't care about. But the general princ...
Link: AllMyData I occasionally backed up my files. But it was always ad-hoc: zip up an archive of some files, upload it to my web server. Done by hand when I got around to it (not often). Then there was the time ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even San Jose I like The Game. I like the puzzles, but in between puzzles, I like hopping into a van and zipping around, visiting interesting places. Even though... all too often we don't really linger at the in...
Site: Yet more Library Book Cart graffiti photos I uploaded more library book truck graffiti photos (scroll down to the section marked February 2009 for the latest greatest). Can you find the palindrome? I knew you could.Labels: libraries, photog...
Book Report: Altered Carbon A fun piece of cyberpunky science fiction. Where by "fun... cyberpunky", I of course mean cynical and bleak. Personalities can be placed into new bodies. Criminals are punished by going into force...
Book Report: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I guess I made through ~100 pages of palace intrigue before I realized I don't especially want to read through that much palace intrigue. Yeah, that's right, I'm yet another person who made it partw...
Book Report: The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest Just hours left until BANG XX. Can I claim that this is an appropriate time for a book report for a book that has 20 in its title? It's my blog; I can claim anything. The First $20 Million is Alway...
Book Report: Gaudy Century I'm taking the day off work today. It's the day after a Bay Area Night Game (a rather-fun instance thereof). It was one of those Bay Area Night Games that actually happens at night, and thus I was ...
Book Report: Group Theory in the Bedroom It's a collection of essays by Brian Hayes--the guy whose magazine article got me into Markov Chain-generated English drivel. I was able to follow most of these essays, which was darned nice since I'...
Book Report: Hackers and Painters It's a bunch of essays by Paul Graham about software development and other kinds of development. Some of these essays are interesting, some are irritating. They're interesting because Paul has a wel...
Book Report: Letting Go of the Words I'm a professional technical writer and I recommend this book about writing: Letting Go of the Words. I theoretically train engineers so that they can write clearly. This book would help those peopl...
Book Report: The Lord of Castle Black Some might say it's been too hectic of a week for me to post a book report, but prepare to be amazed at my review of The Lord of Castle Black: Swashbuckling swords and sorcery.Labels: book...
Book Report: On a Roll This is a book about business, yet it's a good book. It's Howard Jonas' autobiography. He starts out operating a hot-dog pushcart. He moves on to distributing those tourism brochures you see in ho...
Book Report: Predictably Irrational A series of musings about how people really behave. Or, rather, how they misbehave. Describes experiments about placebos, cheating, and other circumstances in which people lie to themselves and to o...
Link: Bookarmy Bookarmy is a book rating website. Yes, I keep trying book rating websites. I keep hoping they'll turn into book recommendation sites. Bookarmy is a book recommendation website! Or, uhm, maybe. H...
Link: Javascript the Good Parts Yes, I should be writing about BATH4 and MSPH1[23]. But that would require effort. But link posts are easy. So I'll link to a video of Douglas Crockford talking about the good parts of Javascript....
Link: McGuffin GC post Burninator Corey dug out some notes from being GC on the excellent The McGuffin Game. Some good stuff in there for aspiring GC folks, I bet. Securing a location is a lot like investing: it doesn't...
Link: XXX, Poison Picnic Puzzlehunts I'm not cool enough to attend SXSW, but when folks there twitter about attending a puzzlehunt lecture, I pay attention. A lecture about puzzlehunts, forsooth. Apparently, a couple of folks put togeth...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even scattered around San Francisco I typed up some notes on BATH 4 DIchotomY. Like some notes about things I worried about that turned out not to be problems. And things I didn't worry about that turned out to be problems. And, at l...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even appearing simultaneously in Redmond and Palo Alto Behold, it is notes from Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 1[23]. I volunteered at the bay area simulcast. I took a couple of crappy cameraphone photos of the playtest. I dressed up as the angel of death and ot...
Puzzlehunts are Everywhere, even my Parents' House Yeah, I should really work on a write-up about BANG XX. But today I hung out with family. My cousin Nancy, her husband, and her son came over to my parents' place for a visit, staying last night &a...
Book Report: Applied Cryptography This is an old textbook about applying cryptography; that is, it's about computer security. It's the textbook by Bruce Schneier, the book he later said wasn't so important--you can get this stuff ri...
Book Report: The Best American Essays 2006 It's a collection of essays, not in any particular field. Apparently essayists, when they aren't writing about something in particular--uhm, apparently, they tend to write about themselves. Or else ...
Book Report: Code I picked up this book because I'd heard it talked about codes and also about digital circuit design, two topics dear to my heart. I started on it and it seemed pretty readable. But it stayed with p...
Book Report: Designing Web Usability This book is about web usability. It's kinda old, from the year 2000. Reading it with this historical hindsight was somewhat discouraging. Apparently, webmasters have made the same mistakes for sev...
Book Report: The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison I've "used" Oracle applications. When I say "used", I mean "tried and gave up". Oracle calendar was slow, buggy, and thought it was a good idea to store my password, unencrypted, in a publically vi...
Book Report: The Elements of Programming Style Non-programmers might not realize it, but some computer program source code is even harder to read than the rest. Some of this code is so messy that an experienced programmer looks at it and says "I...
Book Report: Getting to YES This book is about negotiating agreements. You want mushroom pizza, they want bell pepper pizza, how do you figure out what to do? You look for middle ground, of course, and this book talks some ab...
Book Report: The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You I read this book because it's by Dorothy Bryant who wrote the excellent The Confessions of Madame Psyche. I read it even though my mom read it and didn't care for it much. I didn't care for it much...
Book Report: The Mote in God's Eye Happy National Poetry Month! To celebrate, this blog post contains no poetry. You're welcome. The Mote in God's Eye is a science fiction classic that I never got around to reading. Except that I ...
Book Report: Saturn's Children This sci-fi book, dedicated to Heinlein, features an android female sexbot who-- Hey, wait, come back! You're thinking that the book is going to be some awful misogynistic piece of crap. But it's n...
Book Report: Station This comic book is a murder mystery set on the International Space Station. It was OK. Maybe if I were more of a space-nerd, I would have liked how the story brought in well-researched bits of ISS l...
I cancelled my T-Mobile account, and it went great I tried out a new mobile phone recently. I did so with some nervousness--I had to get an account with T-Mobile. I wasn't sure I was going to like the phone better than my current phone... so maybe I...
Link: Ken Jennings roolz San Francisco City Hall runs this town. And who runs city hall? Not Gavin Newsom--he's bumbling around, grooming himself for a gubernatorial run. Fortunately Jeopardy star Ken Jennings stepped in to keep city ha...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Tampa A few years back, I pointed out a multi-day Game shaping up in New Zealand with a bionic theme. That game never came together. But all was not lost! Eagle-eyed Justin Graham got word: The GC for tha...
Zine Report: Wired 17.05 (May 2009) I picked up the latest issue of Wired. A bunch of famous puzzlers made puzzles for it. There's, like, hidden puzzles inside. I didn't make it very far. There's a lot of stuff in Wired magazine. ...
Book Report: The Doomfarers of Coramonde This book has everything: wizardry, parallel worlds, lizard men, a dragon, ogres, magical swords, a flying saucer, romance, court intrigue, an armored personnel carrier, death scenes, a dude who was ...
Book Report: Elephant Tramp George "Slim" Lewis was an animal trainer in the depression-era USA. He rode the rails from circus to circus, handling elephants. He specialized in unruly elephants. Thus, this book has a "thrille...
Book Report: The Eyre Affair This book is set in a parallel universe. In this universe, mad science reigns. People care about literature! There are vampires! It's all different from our universe! And yet somehow similar! Y...
Book Report: The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR This book, written by PR consultants tells you why your business is spending too much money on advertising and should spend money on PR instead. Advertising lacks credibility. E.g., when I see an o...
Book Report: Microsoft Rebooted This book is about changing a company's culture. It's about Microsoft. It's about Gates and Ballmer shifting the company's culture as they had to comply with the various legal judgments against the...
Book Report: Myth-Nomers and Im-Pervections I read this book years ago, but I read it again more recently. It was on sale as a tiny paperback. Sometimes it's useful to have a pocket book that, you know, fits in your pocket. That way you can...
Book Report: Pattern Recognition I'd heard that William Gibson had written Pattern Recognition, this book that wasn't science fiction. So I didn't read it. That was years ago. More recently, I read Spook Country that wasn't exactl...
Book Report: Un Lun Dun Before I launch into a complain-y whine about a book, I want to remind myself that there are good things in life. Yesterday was a good day. (I didn't even have to use my A.K.) There were good comic...
Jotting Notes on DeeAnn Soles GC Summit 2009 Presentation: Being GC [DeeAnn Sole of Team Snout spoke at the GC Summit 2009. You remember when I volunteered on the Hogwart's Game, I followed around this one lady who, operationally, had the whole game in her head? The...
Jotting notes on Scott Blomquists' GC Summit 2009 Lecture "An Analytic Framework for Estimating Puzzle Quality" [I re-watched another 2009 GC Summit lecture. In this one, Scott Blomquist of Team Sharkbait talks about measuring puzzle quality. It's kinda a measure of puzzle simplicity--avoiding putting stuff ...
Jotting notes on Teresa Torres' GC Summit 2009 Lecture "GC Transparency" [A few months back, I went to the 2009 GC Summit, where Game Control people exchange philosophy, anecdotes, and techniques. I didn't take notes then. I retain things better when I take notes. So t...
Non-Spoilery Shinteki Report Yay! That was awesome!Labels: awesome, puzzlehunts...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, which helps explain how we kept showing up at clue sites Behold my notes from the excellent BANG XX. Yes, that game was a while ago. Hey, if I publish the notes for BANG 20 before BANG 21 starts, that's not late, right? What's that you say? Something a...
Rerun, sort of: 25 random things meme [A few months back, I posted a note on Facebook. It went a little something like this.] How it is supposed to work....but don't feel obligated: once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a ...
Texas Travelog A while back, I asked for Texas travel advice and y'all had good advice. Where by "y'all" I mean "Curtis" Thank you, Curtis! (I think Darcy told me to go to Austin; this advice was disqualified on t...
Book Report: The Box It's a book about cargo boxes. You know, intermodal freight containers. That was enough to get me to read the book. There's interesting stuff in here for economists, policy wonks, labor history fo...
Book Report: Casanova book one: Luxuria This comic book made no sense. It feels kinda plot-holish. You find out that the main character can make guns fall apart through mysteeeeerious powers, but earlier he didn't seem to use this power ...
Book Report: The Complete Annotated Oz Squad, Volume One There's this comic book called Oz Squad. It's old. I read it long ago. At one point in the comic, one of the characters, Scarecrow, writes some graffiti: ALL ART MUST PERISH! That phrase stuck ...
Book Report: The Crossroads of Time In this parallel-worlds scifi adventure, our hero meets some people who are largely, but not 100% like him; he figures they will all get along OK, and they do. He goes to strange places similar to o...
Book Report: Elephant Memories This book is subtitled "thirteen years in the life of an elephant family". It's by Cynthia Moss, who watched the elephants at what became Amboseli National Park north of Mt Kilimanjaro. The book re...
Book Report: An Evil Guest Amongst books set in the Lovecraftian "Mythos" universe, this is the best I've read so far. That's kind of a backhanded compliment. I dislike H.P. Lovecraft's Mythos books. I suppose it's guilt by ...
Book Report: A Feast for Crows I was a tourist in downtown Houston. I'd brought a couple of books with me--I finished those and left them behind. So now I had room in my bag for a new book. And I'd need a new book or else I'd h...
Book Report: Fire Time Fire Time is a science fiction novel from the early 70s. It brings you back to an earlier kind of science fiction. The author Poul Anderson drew out a solar system based on a trinary star. Then he...
Book Report: Grayson I read this book because it was an Amazon recommendation, albeit a tepid one. Wow, what a great book! Remember Lynne Cox, the lady who swam to Antarctica? She wrote this book about a long swim off...
Book Report: Super Spy It is a comic book, a collection of little spy stories. I bought it because it was an Amazon recommendation (albeit a tepid Amazon recommendation) and it had Morse Code on the cover. I didn't like ...
Information Architecture: There Oughtta be a Law I recently read an article by London Times writer Alan Brien in which he wrote "I used to think that I was the first reader, enraged by the difficulty of tracking down a passage in a long work of r...
Jotting Notes on the Ghost Patrol talk at GC Summit 2009 [I went to the GC Summit 2009, at which various folks talked about how they run The Game. I didn't take notes then, figuring I could watch the video later. So now I'm watching the video, specificall...
Link: Plain ol' Tasha Tasha draws a comic. It's pretty good. She was inspired by Jim's Journal, and that inspiration shows. You might think I'd link to a good comic to recommend it. But I never got around to it. Yest...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even in the News Alert reader Mahlen spotted this article at SFGate, an essay by Dave Blum of Dr Clue: ..."The Amazing Race" definitely has boosted interest in treasure hunts, but that sort of competition and dysfu...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even the Marin Headlands and maybe the Seat in Front of me on the Bus There was that awesome Shinteki Decathlon game a couple of weeks ago. One of the clue sites was Hawk Hill, a high hill in the Marin Headlands. It seemed like a neat site, so... yesterday I went bac...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Brevard County, Florida Brevard County Florida was already cool what with Cape Canaveral and all. But it's even cooler now: they have Midnight Madness Brevard. It's pretty The Game-like, but different. The activities are...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Russia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, and Ukraine According to an article linked from the Pervasive Games blog, Dozor is a Russian team-based game that sounds Game-like. You'd think I'd be glad to hear about it. Except I'm not so glad. Because--why...
White Ninjas-Specific Show Report Hey, somebody tell Bay Area Night Game Team White Ninjas that I found the perfect band to play their theme song. It's Leather Feather! Most of the people in the band dress up as white ninjas! (Or ...
Aiming for Precisionism but Missing When I was in Houston, I took perhaps my favorite photo-of-mine ever, this shot of the Houston Hyatt. It reminded me of some photos that the artist Charles Sheeler took. But he didn't leave his pho...
Book Report: The Big Oyster It's kind of a history of the oyster. It's kind of a history of shellfishing in New York City harbor. Once there were oysters. Then they were overfished. Then they were cultivated. Then water poll...
Book Report: Ecology of Fear Angelenos worry about disaster a lot. At least that's the premise of Ecology of Fear. Los Angleles is prone to disaster, both in real life, in the movies, in books,... Maybe it's true. And yet. H...
Book Report: Incognegro My domain, lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us, was out of commission for a few days. Sorry about the missing emails. Anyhow, the domain is back now. That calls for a celebration. Or a comic book report ...
Book Report: Security Engineering This book is humongous! It's a survey of security computer engineering. It doesn't go into depth on any one topic, but it's got plenty of breadth. In areas where I already knew something, this boo...
Book Report: Sleeper (Season One) Happy comic-con season! I guess I'll post a comic book report about Sleeper. This comic book is a combination of an undercover cop story with superheroes. Our hero has gone undercover in a superpo...
Book Report: Stiff (The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers) There's some interesting stuff in this book about scientific, medical, and engineering-testing uses of human cadavers. There's some interesting stuff, but there's some "humorous" reportage to slog t...
Comic Report: Ex Machina (the first several collections) When I first heard about the comic book "Ex Machina", I stopped paying attention too soon. I heard that the protagonist is a superhero who can talk to machines. And those do what he says instead of...
Link: Auto-translation of foreign web pages getting more convenient I sometimes visit web pages that are in languages other than American. To understand those pages, I need translation. For a while, the Google Toolbar has had a useful button: you can press this bu...
Link: Bang XXVI The web page for BANG XXVI gives my browser window a hard time, but it's announcing a SNAP simulcast, and that's a good thing to know about.Labels: link, puzzlehunts...
Link: Pimp my Bookcart Contest Some webcomic is holding a Bookcart decoration contest. The only place I have ever seen decorated book carts is at UC Berkeley's library; that's where I've shot all of my book cart graffiti photos. ...
Milestone: 14 Million Hits Wow, it's this web site's 14 millionth hit. The people and the robots, they keep showing up. 118.237.143.134 - - [06/Jul/2009:04:35:09 -0400] "HEAD /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 0 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Wi...
OpenID, OAuth, Learning by Gossip Last weekend, I did some programming. Well, not much programming. Mostly I did research preparatory to programming. Well, not exactly research. It was more un-research. I started out learning ho...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Marx Meadow, Hawk Hill, and other places around the San Francisco Bay Area Against all odds, I wrote about Shinteki Decathlon 5. I played the first weekend; the second weekend I volunteered. Thus, there's a pile of semi-related stuff in that write-up. It's mostly ab...
Zine Report: Giant Robot #60 There's a photo of Ryohei Tanaka's equipment. Tanaka makes art by cutting paper. His equipment--an assortment of scissors and... dyes? An article by a guy who photographed some film locations from...
50 Bands Meme OK, here are the rules. Test your memory and your love of live music by listing 50 artists or bands (or as many as you can remember) you've seen in concert. List the first 50 acts that come into your...
Book Report: Alphabet Juice This book is a sort of lexicon, except that instead of definitions there are riffs. These are some of the author's favorite words, or at least words that he wanted to write about. He likes to pron...
Book Report: I Wish there was Something that I Could Quit It's a novel by Aaron Cometbus! I hadn't heard it had been published until I entered a bunch of book ratings into Amazon.com. Amazon.com's recommendation engine recommended the book. Three cheers ...
Book Report: Knowledge Sharing in Software Development I was in meetings most of this last week at work. Meanwhile, one of my co-workers was learning a new style of programming--and thus was trying to learn about four big new things at once. She sent m...
Book Report: Lewis Carroll in Numberland This book is about Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson as a mathematician. There were errors in the parts that I understood. So I didn't trust the other parts to help me to understand new stuff. Maybe I...
Book Report: Notes from a Broad I bought this book because its author is "Fran Lebowitz". This is not the same Fran Lebowitz who wrote the excellent Metropolitan Life and Social Studies. Rather, this is the "Fran Lebowitz" who us...
Book Report: Slack Today I was that guy on the bus who wears too much scent. Not my fault! An automatic air freshener squirted me. Now I know why "fresh" can mean "offensive". I am very fresh right now, in that sens...
Book Report: Spin Control This book is a novel. This book is about human evolution. No, wait, this book is about the evolution of society. No, wait, this book is about changes in society post-singularity. No, wait, this boo...
Comic Report: The Question: The Five Books of Blood I picked up this comic book collection "The Five Books of Blood" because it was written by Greg Rucka, who has written some good stuff. So, he's written some good stuff. But he also wrote "The Five...
Google & OpenID: discovery URL A while back, I mentioned that Google supported Opendid. There's one important detail that I had a hard time finding amidst the mountains of documentation: If the user wants to use their Google acco...
Jotting Notes on Red Byer's GC Summit 2009 Talk "Run More Games" OK, jotting some notes about Red Byer's GC Summit 2009 talk "Run More Games". Yes, the talk was months ago; my notes are not timely. Oh, before I even start, I should link to Red's own notes about ...
Link: Deny you ever read about Crypto Strikes Back in this blog post In theory, I'm hobbyishly working on a little programming project. In practice, I make almost no progress on it. I'm almost never home and awake and alert enough to code. The bad news is: not much...
Link: How to stop leaking private info each time a FB friend takes a personality quiz A while back, I started looking at FB app coding, and was thusly creeped out. When someone writes a Facebook app, e.g., one of those What sandwich condiment are you?!? quizzes, they can tell that app...
Link: Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World Puzzling World is a tourist destination in New Zealand. It started out as a big maze for people to wander around in. Then they added some strange attractions. Some of the ad copy worries me, thoug...
Tiny Update: finally posted zombie chess puzzle layout photo Finally posted a photo of the Zombie Chess board layout to the directory of Zombie BANG photos. Why yes, that did take a while.Labels: photo, puzzlehunts...
Book Report: Remix It's a book by Lawrence Lessig from 2008, and therefore it's about copyright law. (Nowadays he does election finance reform. Back then he was all about the copyrights.) It's about mashups. It's ai...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Stanford I uploaded a few photos from BANG 25.Labels: photo, puzzlehunts, site...
Rest in peace, Jimmy Lefkowitz. You fit a lot of life into a short span of time. ...
Book Report: Amazonia Memoirs by some guy who was employee #55 at Amazon.com. He was an in-house editor. Amazon wanted to have some folks on staff who could write up book reviews. This was before they let any bozo with...
Book Report: The Best of 2600 (a Hacker Odyssey) I used to read a little newsletter called 2600. It billed itself as The Hacker Quarterly, which makes it sound like it was full of sploits for breaking in to computer systems. But it wasn't really ...
Book Report: The City & The City It is a new book by China Miéville. It has a creepy premise, and is very paranoid. There are two cities which occupy the same geographic space. How do they coexist? Citizens of each city ha...
Book Report: Killing Neighbors I used to work for a lady named Lee Ann Fujii. She was pretty cool, so when I heard that she wrote a book, I figured I'd read it to see what she's been up to. She's now a foreign policy wonk special...
Posted Chicago Photos I went to Yosemite! But that was this week. Last-last week my parents and I went to Chicago. I posted some photos, some mine, some other folks'. They're more likely to interest you if you're related...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere simultaneously I posted some notes on DASH #1. There's a photo. This would be a good time for me to mention: "playdash". (My DASH photo is not as cool as the photo of Jack o Lanterns including one with a hi...
Yosemite Photos I went to Yosemite earlier this month. While I was there, I took some Yosemite photos, which I now make available to you, the internet. Thank goodness, right? I mean, the internet totally suffered...
Book Report: Broken Angels I got kind of tired of space marines. Maybe I played too much Quake, back in the day. Broken Angels is a book about space marines. Sort of. Close enough. I didn't really get into it, but I'm not...
Book Report: The Great Gamble It's a book about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, telling it from the Soviet point of view, based on interviews with Soviet soldiers. It's like a horror movie where you want to yell at the chara...
Book Report: The Mythical Man-Month (leftover cheap joke) Last week, I posted a rough draft of a study guide for The Mythical Man-Month. I left a cheap joke out of that study guide. That study guide was serious business and had no room for cheap jokes. S...
Book Report: The Mythical Man-Month (a Study Guide) If this book report seems a little heavy on the questions? It's because it's the first draft of a study guide? For people reading the book? Oh man it's way too long? But hey give me a break, it's...
Comic Report: Girl Genius Collection #8 (Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones) | Act-i-Vate Primer It seems kind of silly to post an online review a comic book when folks can go read the comic online and decide for themselves. And yet, here we are: Girl Genius. Girl Genius is a darned fun story ...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the world of corporate training... hey, don't fall asleep when I say that At work, I work in a training group. I was just listening to one of my fellow trainers talk about an outfit that makes some service for education/train-ish folks. It's called Moving Knowledge. It's...
Tutorial: Closure Tools Javascript compiler and library There are some fine tutorials out there for using Closure Tools, but I wrote a tutorial anyhow. Go read Closure Tutorial: Displaying Friendfeed Items. Uhm, by "Closure Tools", I mean the set of rec...
Zine Report: Cometbus #52 "the Spirit of St Louis" Punk is about community--but this (fictional, keep reminding yourself it's fictional) story is the story of a punk community that's too small, too self-involved. The protagonist came from Berkeley, ...
APOLOGIZE TO THE RICE RIGHT NOW A few months back, an ice cream manufacturer rolled out a big advertising campaign in San Francisco: a bunch of big posters saying "San Francisco Deserves a Better Treat Than Rice". If they'd said "...
Book Report: The Berkeley Pit Cousin Eric was in town this weekend. There was some sight-seeing. One place of interest was Berkeley. My parents pointed out some places of interest for the Free Speech Movement: here was the pla...
Book Report: Design for Community It's Derek Powazek's 2002 book about making web sites that work well for communities. There were examples of things that worked well, things that didn't. A lot of this material is stuff you get to ...
Book Report: Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada Good writing can help your work's longevity. But it doesn't fix everything. Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada is a well-written book. It's from 1872. Charles King was a good writer. But... it ...
Book Report: Oil! This is the book that the movie "There Will Be Blood" was based on. But that's not how I heard of this book. I saw Word for Word perform the first chapter. This group acts out short stories and st...
Book Report: The Snowball It's a biography of Warren Buffet. It's pretty long. But there are some good stories in here, the writing is good, and it smells well-researched. It edges around some touchy topics, but it's prett...
Milestone: 15 Million Hits I'm writing this in kind of a hurry. An out-of-town cousin is in town. There have been fun activities. There will be more. Thus, apologies. I write in haste. The 15 millionth item (modulo the us...
Puzzle Things are Everywhere, with Local Witnesses A while back, I blogged about Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World, a tourist spot in New Zealand with a big maze and other weirdness. Why do I bring this up? Local gamist Chiu-Ki Chan went there, a...